Friday, 30 March 2007

Listen Game

So what's the difference to the Major Minor game? Instead of coming up with tags you get to choose from a predefined set (most of the time). And unlike the Major Minor game, you always get to know how others described the music you just listened to. If you liked the Major Minor game, you should definitely try the Listen Game... it's lots of fun!

I had the pleasure to work together with Doug last summer in Tsukuba. I was skeptical when he talked about the ESP game and how it would be nice to do something similar for music. I believed music and images are conceptually too different. I'm very glad my skepticism hasn't influenced him :-)

Why was I so skeptical? Well, I always am. In addition, it only takes one look to get an overview of an image, but it takes a lot longer to get an overview of, for example, a Mozart sonata or even a 3 minute pop song. Furthermore, I believe the key point about the ESP game is the interaction with another person... I thought that for music the ratio between time spent viewing/listening to the content and time spent interacting would not make it an attractive game.

However, both Listen Game and the Major Minor game use only excerpts of music. Also both games developed very clever and very different ways to allow the players to interact with each other without needing to wait for each other. I'd love to see more games like these :-)